Spin Control: Necessary for late campaign TV viewing – the fast-forward button

With a week and a half left before the general election, Americans might be ready to vote overwhelmingly for the best innovation of the late 20th century.

No, not the internet or the mobile phone. Hands down, it’s the video recorder with a fast-forward button that lets us speed through the campaign commercials that have crowded out the pharmaceutical ads on most channels.

These 10 days are the worst of times for such commercials, as campaigns make their final push.

Washington residents might have been surprised by a recent commercial on some of the broadcast and news networks that carried a warning to viewers about controversial content. The commercial for Constitutional Party candidate Randall Terry is something like walking past a graphic anti-abortion protest by Operation Rescue.

That’s probably no surprise, as Terry is a founder of that organization, which has been involved in protests across the country, including some in Spokane. But the commercial does demonstrate the strategic problem with a national ad buy. Terry isn’t even on the ballot in Washington, or 37 other states, so the commercials are likely to motivate abortion-rights supporters to cast their ballots – if they need any extra push.

He is on the ballot in Idaho, where Constitution Party candidates usually get a few thousand votes.

Spokane voters are also spared – mercifully, one might argue – from one of Washington’s goofiest commercials of the election year. A pitch by Democratic U.S. Rep. Kim Schrier has a series of terrible puns based on apples, which is either a nod to the fact that the state’s Redistricting Commission pushed her constituency farther east into the fruit-producing regions of central Washington, or it’s an attempt to appeal the middle-aged male vote with a series of terrible “Dad jokes.”

In the inbox

Last week’s column, which mused about advantages of swapping the Electoral College for a national popular vote as a way to spread the presidential campaigning beyond a few “battleground states,” prompted more than the usual reader response.

Several pointed to past analyses that said it would merely shift it to the candidates concentrating on a few populous states that are safely Democratic – California and New York – or safely Republican – like Texas and Florida.

But most such analyses assume that campaigns would function much as they do now. Most campaigns take those states for granted, even though California and New York have some deep red pockets, while Texas and Florida have some royally blue areas. The presidential race is an opportunity to maximize the party’s strength, but not when the campaigns ignore them.

Switching to a national popular vote would be a way to shake up the campaigns and force them to try new strategies.

Another reader suggested that the winner should be the candidate who wins the most states, or perhaps the most counties. The first would give a big advantage to less-populated rural areas in most presidential races, while the latter would give them an enormous advantage.

The size and number of counties varies greatly from state to state, even more than the population does.

California has 58 counties, Texas has 254. Washington has 39 counties, while Arizona, which has close to the same population, has 15, and Missouri, which has slightly less area, has 114.

All of this is fairly academic, for as one veteran of many political battles noted, the Electoral College debate is even more rarefield than the Daylight Saving Time debate. The former pops up every four years and goes dormant after the presidential election. The latter happens twice a year when the clocks change.

They both seem to have about an equal chance of changing.

Annual admonition

Because of the calendar, Election Day in America always falls close to Halloween.

That means candidate signs sometimes appear with ghosts, skeletons and fake gravestones in holiday yard displays, which can call into question whether residents are expressing support for the people on the sign or suggesting passersby should consider those candidates among the walking dead.

Open to interpretation.

What’s not open to interpretation is that a small amount of Halloween activity involves more tricking than treating. Yard signs can present a tempting target for the former.

If you want to be sure your signs will see the final week of the campaign, move them into the house, garage or backyard for the next couple of days.

If you leave them out and something happens to them, don’t expect sympathy.